It also creates a gusher of money for recycling into the global economy. This can pay for new technology and upgraded infrastructure, as well as to reducing government debt, meeting the rising costs of aging populations and funding better education and health care.

All of those, in turn, will generate their own positive externalities over time. In short, forcing dramatic change in the fossil fuel industry through proper taxation is highly profitable over the short-, medium and long term. Best of all the biggest elephant in the industry, Exxon, agrees.

Over the short term, higher carbon prices reduce negative behavior. This includes unfettered use of high emission energy.

Over the medium term, higher carbon prices will lead to more economic activity as the carbon tax funds are invested in new and societally beneficial growth industries rather than being sucked up by fossil fuel industry rent seeking.

Over the long term, the investments will generate ever larger environmental, social and economic dividends as their benefits compound.

Therefore, instead of seeing climate change as a problem, climate change needs to be seen (correctly) as the mother of all opportunities to change a pile of bad habits and make the world a much better place.

The above will be self-evidently obvious to all but those in the fossil fuel industry.

In the United States, profligate fiscal policy (including heaps of unwarranted subsidies to oil, gas and coal) are swelling the US debt-to-GDP ratio toward 100%.

This is occurring as an aging population is putting strain on medical facilities, while underfunded Social Security will go broke. Who comes first: fossil fuel interests, or people?

Carbon prices can help solve the problem, with money left over for investment in new technologies that in turn spur their own economic growth.

These result: the the next batch of Microsofts, Amazons, Apples and Googles. These will enrich investors.

With this amazing cornucopia of benefits, it often becomes hard to understand why there even exists opposition to higher carbon pricing. The only beneficiaries of the status quo are fossil fuel companies.

Another benefit of using carbon pricing to reduce emissions is that it helps the insurance industry. The increasing pace of climate disasters is costing the industry immensely.

If it keeps up, it will strain social stability.

Natural disasters made 2017 a year of record insurance losses.Source: Munich Re